Why so much gloom over a technology that so many of us find so useful and (dare we suggest) fun?
These headlines are just a few soundbites from the media panic that preceded this fall's release of a
Carnegie-Mellon University study on Internet use and
depression. In a non-random study of 169 people in 73 households, researchers thought they found a
small but statistically significant increase in loneliness and depression associated with increased
Internet use. Many media outlets, though the researchers were cautious about drawing drastic
conclusions from their study, immediately reported the link between online use and depression as a
rock-solid causality--as in the AP's headline "More Internet Use is More Depressing."

Within the week, journalists like Salon magazine's Scott Rosenberg and
the New York Times' Denise Caruso--along with a host of academics--started raising
questions about the HomeNet study. Numerous news reports then began quoting critical experts,
who pointed out that the Carnegie-Mellon researchers had used no control group of demographically
similar people who stayed offline. The sample also wasn't random: The subjects had never spent time
online before and received free and unlimited access from Carnegie-Mellon in return for participating
in the study. Other observers noted that many of the participants were teenagers, who are subject to
inexplicable mood swings. Quite a few jokers pointed out a geographical problem: Maybe it's
always increasingly depressing to live in Pittsburgh. Still others noted that it could be a
stretch to call a 1 percent self-reported increase (in quite subjectively defined feelings) "statistically
significant."

Dr. Michael Liebowitz, a Columbia University psychiatrist and director of the Anxiety Disorders
Clinic at New York State Psychiatric
Institute, was skeptical about the researchers'--and the media's--notion that the Internet was
causing depression: "I think it's the other way around. They go on because they're depressed. From
my experience with my own patients, [the Internet] is like video games: If people don't have the
motivation to do much else, they can still find something pleasurable in it."

Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans sums up the fracas aptly: "It was a perfect
person-bites-dog story, but if the journalists involved knew how to understand research they would
have seen its many faults at once, and noticed that the person barely nicked the dog." Noting that a
few days later, reporters did write about the widespead academic criticism of the study, Gans
comments, "One might ask why the first set of reporters did not ask professional researchers to look
at the study before they wrote their pieces, but that would have killed the story, wouldn't it?"

Why were the media so eager to believe that the Internet is a downer? And why, despite the study's
now widely covered flaws, are many print reporters still referring to it uncritically? Gans thinks it's
because most journalists don't really understand the basics of research methodology. John Pavlik, executive
director of the Center for New Media and
professor at the Graduate School of Journalism,
thinks the Carnegie-Mellon study got caught in the crossfire of the old- and new-media wars.

He notes that among
journalists working in traditional media, "'Internet is bad' stories are very popular: child porn,
Internet gambling, links between the Internet and drug use, [online] white-collar crime, the fear that
someone's going to steal your identity." Indeed, the famous pornography study also conducted at
Carnegie-Mellon--now considered deeply flawed--got so much play that many now hold it
responsible for the Communications
Decency Act of 1995. The role of electronic communication in several high-profile rapes,
murders, and stalkings has also been grimly highlighted. At around the same time that the HomeNet
study was released, the media was also frothing at the mouth over the equally dubious threat of
"Internet addiction." "They're afraid of it," Pavlik says of traditional journalists and the Internet.
"They're threatened by it because it turns over too much control to the reader."
Not surprisingly, some of the most thoughful coverage of the HomeNet study appeared in online
magazines like Salon and Feed. But the Village Voice should be credited with the most
delightfully zany response. The paper, tacitly acknowledging both the study's absurdity and its larger
metaphorical truth (that these technologies can bring us takeout Chinese food but can't fully nourish
our souls), assigned--or condemned--reporter Austin Bunn to stay online for a whole week and report
on his mental state. The poor fellow cracked after only a couple days. In one of his last diary entries
he writes: "6:15 [a.m.]. I leave the apartment and walk to Prospect Park. I'm breaking the rules, but I
can't help it. This test is over. I'm not sick exactly, but still definitely in need of a cure." --
Liza Featherstone